Clifford Simak - The Shipshape Miracle - And Other Stories

Hart stirred uneasily.

“Not exactly,” he parried. “You won’t be working alone. The Evening Rocket will be behind you.”

“Behind me is right,” snorted Grant. “A long ways behind. A hell of a lot of good the Evening Rocket will do me if I get into a jam a half mile down.”

Hart tilted forward in his chair. “The point is this,” he said. “If we can find there’s something wrong with Snider quartz, we’ll put the heat on Snider. And if we find the UCB has been winking at Snider stuff when they know it’s wrong, we’ll have them across the barrel, too.”

“What a sweet nature you have,” said Grant. “The sort of a guy that would send his old grandma to the gallows for a ninety-six-point streamer.”

“We have a duty to the public,” said Hart solemnly, looking almost like an owl. “It’s our duty to work for the common good of mankind.”

“And for the good of the dear old Evening Rocket,” said Grant. “Up goes the circulation list. Full-page ads telling the readers how we exposed the dirty crooks. And maybe, after we smack Snider quartz flat, there’ll be another quartz company just dying to insert about a million bucks’ worth of advertising in our columns.”

“It isn’t that,” snarled Hart, “and you know it isn’t.” He became oratorical. “Out there is a great empire to be conquered. The ocean bottom. An area two and one half times as great as all the land areas on the Earth. A great new frontier. We’ve made a start at conquering it. Out there are pioneers—”

Grant waved him to silence. “I know,” he said. “Vast riches. Great fields for exploitation. A heritage for the future. I know it. But save it for an editorial.”

Hart leaned back in his chair. “The latest reports of quartz failure come from the rim of the Puerto Rico deep,” he said. “You job will be to find what’s in the cards.”

“I warn you,” said Grant. “When I get back from this one I’m going to get drunk and stay drunk for a month.”

Hart reached into his desk and drew out an envelope. “Your tickets for the sub,” he said. “The bank at Coral City will have instructions to let you draw expenses.”

“O.K.,” said Grant. “I’ll catch you an octopus for a pet.”

The water was blue, shading to violet—a dusky blue like the deeper shade of twilight but still with a faintly luminous quality about it. Long ago the more showy seaweed beds had been left behind and the character of the sea bed had changed. No more beautiful stretches of sand with vegetation and fishes of unearthly colors, delicate and shifting. No more waving sea plumes or golden sea fans. No more unbelievable brilliancy of color.

Now one seemed to be moving into the maws of night. The blue of the water deepened and blurred only a short distance away and even the powerful light of the underwater tank penetrated for only a hundred yards or so.

There was muck underneath, muck and ooze that was deepening as Grant followed the contour of the bottom down toward the deep. Once the tank floundered into a muck trap with its treads spinning helplessly, and he had been forced to use the retractable gear to lift it out—the gear acting like legs, searching for and getting solid footing, heaving the massive tank along.

The character and pattern of life was changing down here, too. Changing to a grimmer pattern—a more ferocious, unrelenting life.

A thing, that was little more than a living mouth, swam across the vision panel, turned back, pressing its blunt face against the glass, mighty mouth agape, wicked fangs shining. A dark shape slithered by, just outside the beam of light.

Grant dropped his eyes to the instruments. Five hundred and fifty feet down. Pressure two hundred fifty-three pounds per square inch.

The other instruments were shivering slightly, but all read correctly. Everything was going fine.

Grant wiped perspiration from his face. “Running this damn tub gets on my nerves,” he told himself, but instantly was reassured with the thought of the massive steel walls, constructed to maintain a maximum of resistance to buckling and bending, of the ports of shatter-proof quartz, laminated, one with the rest of the construction.

But quartz sometimes didn’t stand up—that was what had brought him here. Quartz sometimes went haywire and when it did men died, men who had put their trust in it—men who otherwise could not have hurled their challenge into the teeth of The Bottom with its chilly depths, its monstrous pressure.

The thing that was all mouth had retreated from the vision glass, but another nightmare of the twilight zone had replaced it—a grotesque thing that resembled nothing that ever should have lived.

Grant cursed at it—swung the spotlight back and forth, trying to pick out landmarks. But there was nothing—he was moving across what appeared to be a murky plain, although the indicator showed it had a decided downward slope.

Down there, somewhere ahead, was the Puerto Rico deep, one of the deepest—five and a half miles down. Down there the pressure ranged around six and a half tons a square inch. Too deep for man as yet. Conquest under the four-mile mark would have to await work in the industrial laboratories, would have to wait on man’s ingenuity to build steel and glass that was a little stronger, man’s ability to design new engineering kinks that would give greater strength—or perhaps the construction of a force screen or some other approach as yet merely speculative.

Grant studied his chart. He had kept the course the communications-bureau back at Deep End had outlined for him, but as yet there was no sign of the man he sought. Old Gus, they called him, and it seemed he was a sort of local legend.

“A queer old coot,” the dapper little communications-bureau head had told him. “Depth dippy, I guess. He’s been out there for years, prospecting, fooling around. Couldn’t make him leave now. The Bottom gets in your blood, I guess, if you stay there long enough.”

Grant swept the light back and forth again, but still there was nothing.

Half an hour later the light picked up the dome crouched under a sudden upsoaring of black rock, rising abruptly from the sea floor.

Running the tank in close to the cliff, Grant stopped it and entered the airlock.

Clambering into the mechanical suit, he tightened the lock and slid into the small operator’s chamber with its nightmare of controls. Clumsily, as yet unused to the operation of the suit, he opened the outer lock control.

Outside it was easier and the suit ambled jerkily along, shaking him at every stride. He was within only a short distance of the dome when a shadow detached itself from the cliff and dropped upon him. Grant felt the thud of its impact, saw waving tentacles crawl across the plate, white gristle suction cups seeking to get a hold.

“An octopus,” said Grant disgustedly.

The cephalopod threshed wildly, swinging its tentacles in mighty swipes and then slid off the suit, landing in front of it, hopping to one side. A moment later it scuttled out of the twilit gloom and humped along ahead of Grant.

“I’d like to take a swift kick at you,” Grant told the octopus, “but if I did, I’d lose my balance sure as hell, and a fellow would have to be a magician to get one of these tin cans right side up if it fell over.”

The octopus was a monster. His body was as big as a good-sized watermelon and his eight tentacles would have spanned close to twenty feet.

A suited figure was emerging from the air lock of the dome and Grant shoved a lever to swing his suit’s arm in greeting. The arm of the other suit raised in reply and hurried toward him.

The octopus galloped forward, raising a cloud of murk in its path, and launched itself at the other suit. An expert arm flashed out and warded it off. Steel fingers closed on a tentacle and the suit marched forward, hauling a protesting, squirming octopus along by one of its eight long arms.